TV

The 1980s were a dangerous time for many of us, but it was especially dangerous if you were from a specific demographic: A sitcom mother.

Go ahead, think about it. Have you ever noticed that while you were watching reruns of Diff’rent Strokes or Full House that there was never a mom around? To paraphrase a 90s sitcom, what’s the deal with that?

This was no accident. There was a reason why so many sitcoms were about single fathers dealing with multiple children, and the After Hours team at Cracked took a quick look at why “audiences tuned in week after week to laugh at grieving families and abandoned children?”

In this video, Cracked uncovers the reason that the 80s were such a bad time to be a sitcom mom, or a sit-mom, as I’ll refer to them. Some reasons include: the success of the first example, Diff’rent Strokes led to copycats; the removal of a show’s moral center (the mother) would result in “dad’s burning dinners and uncomfortably buying bras,” as well as unaccompanied minors playing in a dump and getting stuck in a fridge. But ultimately, they discover that these shows were a response to rising divorce rates and the breakdown of the American nuclear family.

Check out the video and learn a little something about how the 80s were a golden age of abandoned kids and idiot fathers.

Jeopardy! has been making quite a comeback in the past few months — what with Alex Trebeck rapping and calling his contestants losers and all. But last night, a contestant on Jeopardy!’s Teen Tournament took the gameshow back for the players.

During "Final Jeopardy!," the contestant, Sabrina, didn't stumble when she didn't know the answer. Instead, she shut Jeopardy! down with an Internet-ready response worth all the Daily Doubles in the world.

Her response to the answer “Roughly half the size of Texas, it's the largest structure made by living creatures and can even be seen from space” was...

The election ends tomorrow, which means that late night TV is about to get a whole lot more boring (unless of course you're really in watching Channing Tatum play Twister — in which case, it’s about to become a whole lot more exciting). But that doesn’t mean we can’t have one final, hardy guffaw at the moments that defined these truly terrible and awful eight months.

Saturday Night Live closed out the election season with an awe-inspiring final debate between Kate McKinnon's Hillary Clinton and Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump, but what of the other great moments of this election cycle, the sketches and segments that kept up sane this past year?

From Jon Oliver’s blistering new nickname for Donald Trump to SNL's instant-classic “Black Jeopardy,” Wired has catalogued the best late night TV comedy of the year. Fall in love all over again with Jon Stewart popping in on Colbert and Jimmy Fallon tussling Donald Trump’s hair. We won’t believe it happened when it’s over, so revel in it all today. Check out Wired’s timeline of the sketches that defined the election here.

And to that we say, so long, Election 2016, you brought out the worst in all of us, and we’re happy to see you go.

Facebook, a never-ending source of useful information, has been our goto for up-to-the-minute election coverage this past season. As such, it’s probably caused us more anxiety about this election than any one speech, Wikileaks email, or video featuring Billy Bush. Your Facebook wall feeds into your worst fears about the candidates, and Stephen Colbert knows it.

On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night, Colbert took a big swig of cough syrup, dusted off his box of Reynolds wrap, and made a new tinfoil hat to block the radio signals that the Illuminati uses to read our minds. Colbert is full of great intel about such things as the whereabouts of Chumbawumba, the shadowy industry of upstate New York weddings, and what oysters actually are. By the end of it, you’ll have your cork board up and long strands of yarn connecting seemingly disparate items together to prove your theory that, hey, what if the Chicken McNugget is more nugget than chicken?